A few weeks ago my wife complained that her Vista desktop was not responding to her typing or mouse clicks. Given the importance of the customer, I immediately sat down at the system to troubleshoot. It wasn’t completely hung, but extremely sluggish. For example, the mouse moved and when I clicked on the start button the start menu opened after about 30 seconds. I suspected that something was hogging the CPU and likely could have resolved the problem simply by logging off or rebooting, but knew that if I didn’t determine the root cause and address it, she’d likely be calling on my technical support services again in the near future. In any case, stooping to that kind of troubleshooting hack is beneath my dignity. I therefore set out to investigate.

My first step was to run Process Explorer to see which process was using the CPU.